


The hidden sound of things approaching

by pulpedeva



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1930s, Implied Rough Sex, M/M, Pre-Canon, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 07:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16761070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pulpedeva/pseuds/pulpedeva
Summary: Ralph did two years of women“I served out the contract, though. No, let’s be honest, I broke out a week short of the contract... All I can remember thinking is “Thank the Lord, back to normal at last.”





	The hidden sound of things approaching

“You might light it for me, at least.” Marion dangled her cigarette before Ralph but followed his gaze to the doorway. She leaned over him and snatched the lighter from his hand. He caught her eye but his was drawn back to the door.

  
“Shut up,” he murmured under his breath and ignored her look of shocked pique. “God, you do over do things.” He smiled more fondly at her.

  
“Well, if you weren’t in such a state, you’d be sharper tonight. I really can’t imagine what possessed you…”

  
“I told you, I thought it’d be safe.”

“Darling, I shouldn’t think it’s ever safe.”

  
“Well, anyway, I’m off next week.” Ralph kept his eye trained on the door. Was it a trick of the light perhaps? It was rather hard to tell properly from this distance. “It really doesn’t signify.”

  
She shrugged and looked about the room which was becoming crowded quickly now. It was a smoke filled, glittering place, three chandeliers dripping with Venetian crystal, waiters circulating discreetly. Fans whirred, throwing the stultifying heat of the late evening about and there was a smell of sweat and jasmine in the air of this ex-patriot haven, the Willingdon Club, full of braying memsahibs and wives just off the boat. And husbands, solicitously bending an ear to listen to breathless waffle.

  
“Lucky my Max Factor covered the worst of it.” Marion threw him a glance and touched the side of his face a little roughly with the palm of her hand. He flinched. “Oh really, you are a dreadful fool. Look, I’ll get us a drink.” She rose, lit the cigarette and tossed the lighter back to him.

  
She began to make her way to the bar on the far side of the room. She moved through the crowd in a lazy, relaxed manner, her bobbed red hair caught up in a diamond grip, green silk following the shape of her body. She seemed conscious of eyes on her as she moved and finally arriving at her destination she leaned over the bar, touching the barman’s hand with hers, looking towards Ralph as she did so.

  
He smiled at her. Playing roles. They were used to it. How else could you pass otherwise? A queer and a lesbian. The first time they’d tried it, it had ended with them both laughing, laid out horizontal on the bed in her lodgings in the mill district. It was quite perverse, but in her flat chested way, she was nearly attractive, and he could always almost overcome his thoughts, or rather, suppress them. And of course, if she turned around.

  
He’d have to get up. There was no point in imagining the worst. He rose smartly and brushed his hands over his tropical whites. The press of bodies made the space feel damp and a little delirious. The lights danced, and he winced as he walked. It wouldn’t do to look too ginger about it though. He straightened his shoulders and strode over.

Ralph had walked along the Duncan Road many times before. But this morning it’s impossible and chaotic charm struck him anew. Probably he was being carried off on a wave of sentimentality, knowing how little time he had left. He moved quickly, dodging carts, men in fez and girls balancing baskets on their heads. The dusty, filthy road, the pink wash of early morning light, the swell of the heat filling the air as the sun rose, gave him a feeling of being at the end of something. Or perhaps the beginning.

  
He paused outside an entrance to one of the small courtyards. He could hear the sounds of the morning and life waking within it, the clatter of pans, water being poured, fire stoked. Outside the coolies ran rapidly back and forth and as he looked along the street, dawn broke over the sleeping figures of women and children, filling the gutters and the pavements.

  
He lit a cigarette and with an empty feeling of subtle anticipation, left the road and began walking along the narrow alley towards the courtyard. The white stone pillars inside dripped guam and at their base, piles of colourful strips of material lay heaped. As he neared the end, he nearly tripped headlong into a man entering the alley at a brisk speed.

They looked at each other for a very brief moment. The other man who had stopped just before him, making no move to stand aside, gave Ralph an appraising look.

  
The smell of spices, cow dung and dust filled the air. Words hung unsaid between them. Ralph should back away and get to his quarters. But there was little to do until the evening. Marion was throwing herself into an impossible seduction of some elderly civil servant’s daughter and she’d already warned him not to pick her up too early. He felt the convergence of loneliness, frustration and recklessness which sometimes encourages impetuous decisions. And besides, the impulse, which had been growing for months, like a loosened stone slipping, or sparks from a fire floating irrepressibly upwards, would not let him turn his back so easily.

  
He held the other man’s gaze. And soon he was climbing some extremely worn marble steps, dipping under laundered sheets slung between perilously rusted iron railings and ducking his head through the doorway of a rough wooden door.

The rickshaw dropped Ralph outside Marion’s rooms in Girangaon. He was hours early. She’d give him hell. He knocked loudly regardless. She opened the door, mouth poised to rebuke him, but took in the raw, tender flesh on his cheek bone and softly purpling lip and with a swift and summarising glance, dragged him inside.

  
She closed the bedroom door to the side firmly and pushed him into a chair by the window.

  
“What on earth possessed you, you idiot?” She pulled the fair hair off his brow and inspected the damage in the unforgiving light.

  
“It was a sort of bet with myself, you know, would I follow through with it, or would I bail out.” He sat still as she traced her fingers over the congealed blood and cut flesh under his eye.

  
“And now you know?” She dabbed at it with a wet handkerchief and tutted.

“Hmmm.” He looked up at her. “Sorry - if I interrupted anything.”

  
“Oh yes, I do have better things to do than waste my time fussing over you.” She pretended indifference but really, her hands as she applied the tincture, were careful and proficient. “You’re not even angry about it, are you?” Suddenly she laughed. “You’re an odd boy.” She touched his face more gently and said, with a sort of pensiveness, “We’d better make the most of it later. I expect we shan’t be seeing each other again.”

  
He looked through the window at the swarms of people clotting the street below them. He felt strangely elated. It was as if had been merely hovering in a self-made purdah and now he had been bitten by reality. He was no longer an outsider watching life as it clattered along, he was caught in the wheels, crushed, dragged along, he was alive.

  
“Oh, do give over, you know you’d be lost without someone to fuss about. It may as well be me as not.” He reached out to touch the hand which still carried the blood-soaked cloth. He felt both free of constraint but wistful of its passing. The light glaring rather harshly on her face, caught the hazel colour around the pupil of her eye. Her thin frame and the prominent arc of her collar bone made her look more boyish than usual. Bent over him as he sat beneath her, closely scrutinising every part of his face, a tender moment could have been captured. She caught his eye and began to look amused.

  
“Oh now, don’t start getting puffed up with all that. You’d know I’d sooner fuck my own brother. We’ve put all that behind us, haven’t we?”

  
He touched her hip as it jutted beneath the silk dressing robe. “It would be easy though, wouldn’t it?” But as he said it, he knew that it was the opposite. He had been dug out and released. It was wrong to pretend otherwise.

The shutters in the room were drawn, but light ran along the slatted wood in white gashes. A jug of water stood by a basin, the bed was untidy, sheets left rumpled and heavy with uninterrupted accomplishment.

  
“You are a pretty boy, aren’t you?” The man stroked the fair hair which lay a little damply over Ralph’s brow and ran his hand along his jawline, pinching a little of the flesh between his fingers, “all done up.” He kept his finger hooked under Ralph’s chin, digging in a little painfully. Ralph kept still.

  
“You’re very uptight, aren’t you? What if I ruffled up that neat little white shirt of yours.” He moved his hand down.

  
“Don’t.” Ralph caught the hand. His grasp was firm. They stood facing each other.

“You’re not hurting me.”

“I’m not trying to.” Ralph released the hand and put his own back down.

  
“You like a little pain?” He watched Ralph’s face, his own quite immobile. He displayed neither interest nor fear. His eyes were odd, an indeterminate hazel, his hair tinged with a dark auburn. In the gloomy light of the room he seemed unreal and insubstantial and the shadows playing across his face made a mystery out of him. Once by the light through the shutters though, Ralph could see he was well built and as he removed his clothes, muscular and solid.

  
Intrigued despite himself, Ralph leaned in a little towards him, pushing his hair away from his forehead. “If you like.”

“Come here.” He held out a hand and as Ralph reached out to take it pulled him forward until he was off balance. As he was stumbling slightly, the other man twisted his arm behind his back and pulled Ralph against him.

  
“You know you shouldn’t spend time lurking around these streets.” He spoke into Ralph’s hair and the soft place between the base of his throat and ear. “People could get the wrong impression.” His accent, which was cut-glass and Oxford, sat at odds with his brawny physicality and the unexpected strength with which he held Ralph’s arm against his back.

  
“Oh, I should have thought people would have got the correct impression.” Ralph’s arm was aching but he kept it still.

  
“Silly boy.” He bit down quite hard on Ralph’s ear lobe. For a moment Ralph felt a primal instinct to drag his arm away and fight back but he felt oddly aroused by the pain in his contorted muscles. He wrenched his arm out of its deadlock and turned and met the other man’s mouth with a violent collision of lips and teeth.

  
Outside there was clattering and the superficial hum of the many stirrings of another day, one repeated over and over again, but inside the room, there was an elemental surge of a new awakening. For Ralph, months of bending his will with a stoic perhaps necessary vanity, forced an unexpectedly abrupt cracking. He felt vital and suddenly sensitive of every contact of his flesh with the other man’s hands.

  
He bit the other man’s lip hard and was answered by the feeling of his own back slammed back against the shutters, sharp edges digging into him while the other man’s hands moved lower. Hands pressed, fingers gripping, flesh bruising, the heavy weight of another against him and the shapes in the rooms full of hazy, obfuscating shadow, yet he was full of a clarity that he had thought lay submerged. He felt stripped down and elemental, there was nothing in him that lay undiscovered or hidden.

  
The day continued, the shadows moved around the room, the midday sun, piercing the shutters seared their bodies with a feverish heat. When dusk fell, Ralph pulled his clothes on, over the tender parts that chaffed when he moved. He stood looking down and along the length of the body beneath him.

“Don’t you have a name?”

  
“Do you need to know it?”

  
They exchanged a look. Neither entirely hostile nor entirely unknowing.

  
Ralph leant against the door frame. “I’ll be seeing you, then.” And walked slowly down the steps and out into the courtyard.

At the last moment a thick knot of people formed themselves by the door obscuring Ralph’s view of the head as it bent forward. But as they cleared, his eyes flicked quickly to the profile that was raising itself. Ralph stiffened a little, but he would have given nothing else away. He moved towards Marion as she lolled over the marble bar counter and laid a hand on the small of her back. She moved back into it and turned to bestow a kiss on his cheek a little less gently then he would have liked.

  
She smiled innocently at him. “That’ll teach you.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and looked at him properly. “What’s up, darling?”

  
“I think we ought to go.” He held her gaze.

  
“Oh?” She never made things easy. Perhaps that was why he had put up with her.

  
Ralph looked back towards the doorway where the throng surrounding the Viceroy and his wife, had temporarily broken apart. Marion looked too. One glance at the sullen yet oddly compelling profile would have told her all she needed to know. The hallmarks of all Ralph’s interests were there, the fragile, pale skin, illusory in a man of over thirty, the strong brow and straight nose, the dark hair with a glint of red. She caught Ralph’s eye and raised her eyebrow. “Naughty boy,” she mouthed. She said it with an inflection of mockery but beneath it there was some sympathy. After all, she had bathed his grazed and bruised face and rubbed iodine into the welts.

  
“No need to drag it out any longer, I should think.” Ralph grasped her elbow and began to manoeuvre her away. She allowed him to with a certain passive capitulation that he knew was all for show. He’d be sad to lose her.

  
They were levelling with the little gathering by the door when the man looked across at Ralph. On the side of his face was a faint but apparent reddening turning to a tender and florid purple. A look passed between them. It was over quickly, and at the same time another man to the left was making a rapid and ebullient introduction, “Ah, here you are Lanyon. Let me introduce David Wray, our new man in Bombay.”

  
Because after all, two years. No, one year and three hundred and fifty eight days.

**Author's Note:**

> The story is inspired by Ralph doing two years of women and this quote below:
> 
> “I served out the contract, though. No, let’s be honest, I broke out a week short of the time. I happened to meet someone and I’d have been at sea a week later. All I can remember thinking is “Thank the Lord, back to normal at last.”
> 
> More posting minus any beta reading, simply because I don't know who to ask! I'd be more than happy for any comments or criticism, as always.  
> 
> 
> But the wise perceive things about to happen.  
> For the gods perceive things in the future,  
> ordinary people things in the present,  
> but the wise perceive things about to happen.
> 
> Philostratos,  
> Life of Apollonios of Tyana, viii, 7
> 
> Ordinary mortals know what's happening now,  
> the gods know what the future holds  
> because they alone are totally enlightened.  
> Wise men are aware of future things  
> just about to happen.  
> Sometimes during moments of intense study  
> their hearing's troubled: the hidden sound  
> of things approaching reaches them,  
> and they listen reverently, while in the street outside  
> the people hear nothing whatsoever.  
> Constantine P. Cavafy


End file.
